A debut teeming with strange delights.
The past comes to unexpected, vivid life in these speculative short stories.
History repeats itself, goes the famous saying by Karl Marx, first as tragedy, then as farce. If that’s true, then the characters in these off-kilter, even madcap, pieces of historical fiction, caught in the strange loops and eddies of speculative time, may have passed beyond both tragedy and farce into an altogether unnamable place. In the show-stopping opening story, Anne Boleyn, à la Groundhog Day, comes back to life after every attempted assassination by Henry VIII (“Let’s Play Dead”). Joan of Arc repeatedly inhabits the sleeping body of housekeeper Claribel in 1926, Joan bent on revenge and Claribel on annihilation after a series of losses leaves her hollowed out (“Our Lady of Resplendent Misfortune”). In the grimly playful finale, readers take a young female scientist working closely with J. Robert Oppenheimer on the Manhattan Project through choices like “To approach the oversized lungs, turn to…” in a surreal choose-your-own-adventure story (“Choose Your Own Apocalypse”). If all this sounds rather bonkers, it is. Ahmad swings for the fences by taking unusual premises—what if many Napoleons rented a house together? What if Nellie Bly met Julius Caesar?—and drives into left field with surreal and speculative plot turns, like talking crows or werewolves that turn into men on the full moon. Doubling down on this weirdness can feel like a hall of mirrors—just as readers settle into a story’s reality, they bump into more illusions. But more often than this effect frustrates, it enchants, and it helps that Ahmad is exceptional at the sentence level: “The heat of July has the wrath of an old god,” reads one description of a New York City summer; thistle grows “in vengeful bursts around the yard.”
A debut teeming with strange delights.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2026
ISBN: 9781250378477
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Oct. 9, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2025
Have tissues ready as you read this. A small package will do.
A love story about a life of second chances.
In Nassau, in the Bahamas, casino detective Vincent LaPorta grills Alfie Logan, who’d come up a winner three times in a row at the roulette table and walked away with $2 million. “How did you do it?” asks the detective. Alfie calmly denies cheating. You wired all the money to a Gianna Rule, LaPorta says. Why? To explain, Alfie produces a composition book with the words “For the Boss, to Be Read Upon My Death” written on the cover. Read this for answers, Alfie suggests, calling it a love story. His mother had passed along to him a strange trait: He can say “Twice!” and go back to a specific time and place to have a do-over. But it only works once for any particular moment, and then he must live with the new consequences. He can only do this for himself and can’t prevent anyone from dying. Alfie regularly uses his power—failing to impress a girl the first time, he finds out more about her, goes back in time, and presto! She likes him. The premise is of course not credible—LaPorta doesn’t buy it either—but it’s intriguing. Most people would probably love to go back and unsay something. The story’s focus is on Alfie’s love for Gianna and whether it’s requited, unrequited, or both. In any case, he’s obsessed with her. He’s a good man, though, an intelligent person with ordinary human failings and a solid moral compass. Albom writes in a warm, easy style that transports the reader to a world of second chances and what-ifs, where spirituality lies close to the surface but never intrudes on the story. Though a cynic will call it sappy, anyone who is sick to their core from the daily news will enjoy this escape from reality.
Have tissues ready as you read this. A small package will do.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780062406682
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A heartbreaking, laugh-provoking, and absolutely Ephron-esque look at the beauty and fragility of everyday life.
A woman faces a health crisis and obsesses over a local accident in this wonderful follow-up to Sandwich (2024).
Newman begins her latest with a quote from Nora Ephron: “Death is a sniper. It strikes people you love, people you like, people you know—it’s everywhere. You could be next. But then you turn out not to be. But then again, you could be.” It sets an appropriate tone for a story that is just as full of death and dread as it is laughter. Two years after the events of Sandwich, Rocky is back home in Western Massachusetts and happily surrounded by family—her daughter, Willa, lives with her and her husband, Nick, while applying to Ph.D. programs; her widowed father, Mort, has moved into the in-law apartment behind their house. When a young man who graduated from high school with Rocky’s son, Jamie, is hit by a train, Rocky finds herself spiraling as she thinks about how close the tragedy came to her own family. She’s also freaking out about a mysterious rash her dermatologist can’t explain. Both instances are tailor-made for internet research and stalking. As Rocky obsessively googles her symptoms and finds only bad news (“Here’s what’s true about the Internet: very infrequently do people log on with their good news. Gosh, they don’t write, I had this weird rash on my forearm? And it turned out to be completely nothing!”), she also compulsively checks the Facebook page of the accident victim’s mother. Newman excels at showing how sorrow and joy coexist in everyday life. She masterfully balances a modern exploration of grief with truly laugh-out-loud lines (one passage about the absurdity of collecting a stool sample and delivering it to the doctor stands out). As Rocky deals with the byzantine frustrations of the medical system, she also has to learn, once more, how to see her children, husband, father, and herself as fully flawed and lovable humans.
A heartbreaking, laugh-provoking, and absolutely Ephron-esque look at the beauty and fragility of everyday life.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9780063453913
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
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